“Which brings us back to my question. What did Ruth’s—”
“Check your e-mail.”
“Right.”
Gurney laid down the phone and opened his e-mail. There it was.
Posted by Ruth J. Blum:
What a day! I spent so much time wondering what the first episode of The Orphans of Murder would be like. I kept trying to remember the things Kim had asked me when she came here. And my answers. I couldn’t remember them all. I was hoping that I had managed to express what I really felt. I believe, like Kim says, that TV sometimes misses the point. They pay attention to sensational things too much, not the real things that matter. I was hoping that The Orphans of Murder might be different, because Kim seemed different. But now I don’t know. I was a little disappointed. I think they must have cut out a lot of our interview to make room for their “experts” and the commercials and all the other stuff. I’m going to call Kim in the morning and ask about it.
Sorry. I have to stop now. Someone just pulled into my driveway. Can you imagine, it’s almost eleven o’clock. Who could it be? One of those big military-looking trucky kind of cars. More later.
Gurney read it again before picking up the phone. “You still there, Jack?”
“Yeah. So her friend in Ithaca is going through her e-mail, around midnight, and discovers that she has a Facebook notification, which she clicks on, and she finds the message that Ruth posted at ten fifty-eight—apparently before she went downstairs to see who was coming to see her in that big military-looking whatever. Could be a Hummer, what do you think?”
“Could be.” Gurney pictured Max Clinter’s combat-ready, camouflage-painted Humvee.
“Well, if it wasn’t a Hummer, what the fuck was it? Anyway, the friend makes all these efforts to get through to Ruth, and, like I said, eventually a trooper comes, checks things out, decides everything looks fine, and he’s about to leave—when the anxious friend shows up in her car, having driven the twenty-five miles up from Ithaca, and insists they break into the house—because she’s afraid something bad has happened. She says if he doesn’t break into the house, she will. Big argument, young trooper almost arrests her, then another trooper comes by, older and wiser, calms everybody down. They start looking around the outside of the house. Eventually they find an open window, more discussion, more debate, et cetera, et cetera. Bottom line, the troopers finally go in and find Ruth Blum’s body.”
“Where?”
“In the entry hall, just inside the front door. Like she opened the door and wham!”
“ME is sure the weapon was an ice pick?”
“Wasn’t much doubt. According to Clegg, fucking thing was still stuck in her.”
“You don’t suppose he could get me into the house, do you?”
“No way. By now it’s been sealed off with a mile of yellow tape by guys for whom you could only be a problem. Their one job right now is to keep the scene pristine till the evidence techs go home and the BCI team hands the whole deal off to the FBI. They’re not about to hang their asses out the window so some retired hotshot from the city can have a walk-through.”
Gurney was itching to see it all for himself. Having a scene described to you was worth maybe 10 percent of being there. But he suspected that Hardwick was right. He couldn’t think of any upside for anyone in BCI, much less the FBI, to get him involved. Which made him wonder again what the upside was for Hardwick. Every time the man passed along information from a confidential file or an internal source, he was putting himself at risk. And he was doing it a lot.
Was he such a pure seeker after truth that its pursuit trumped any concern for rules or his own career? Was he driven by an obsessive desire to embarrass the powerful? Or did the risk itself, the giddy edge of the cliff, attract him with the same power with which it repelled saner men? Gurney had asked himself these questions about the man before. Once again he concluded that the answer was probably yes to all of them.
“So, Davey boy …” Hardwick’s voice jarred him back to the issue at hand. “The plot thickens. Or maybe this makes everything clearer to you. Which is it?”
“I don’t know, Jack. A little of both. It depends on what happens next. In the meantime, is that everything Clegg told you?”
“Almost everything.” Hardwick hesitated. His appetite for dramatic pauses irritated Gurney intensely, but it was a tolerable price to pay for what often followed. “Remember the little plastic animals the Good Shepherd left at the roadside shootings?”
“Yes.” In fact, he’d been thinking about them that morning, wondering about their purpose.
“Well, they found a little plastic animal at the scene—balanced delicately on Ruth Blum’s lips.”
“On her lips?”
“On her lips.”
“What kind of animal?”
“Clegg thinks it was a lion.”
“Wasn’t a lion the first animal in the original sequence of six?”
“Good memory, ace. So what are the odds we can expect five more?”
Gurney had no answer for that.
As soon as he got off the phone with Hardwick, he called Kim. He wondered if she was still at Kyle’s apartment, wondered if they were in bed together, wondered what their plans were for the day, wondered if they knew …
The call went into her voice mail. He left a blunt message. “Hi. I don’t know if it’s on the news yet, but Ruth Blum is dead. She was murdered in her home in Aurora late last night. It’s possible that the Good Shepherd is back, or someone wants us to think so. Call me as soon as you can.”
He tried Kyle’s number, got his voice mail, and left the same message.
He stood staring out the north window of the den at the wet, gray hillside. The rain had stopped, but the eaves continued to drip. The new information from Hardwick was scattering rather than organizing his thoughts. So damn many bits and pieces. It was impossible to see the path through the maze. To take a step forward, one had to know where forward was. He was overcome by a sick feeling that time was running out, that the endgame was rapidly approaching, without even knowing what that might mean.
He had to do something.
For want of a better idea, he found himself in his car, setting out for Aurora.
Two hours later he was turning onto the state road that ran alongside Lake Cayuga, his GPS indicating he was just three miles from Ruth Blum’s address. The lake and its lakefront homes were visible through a border of bare trees on his left. On his right, separated from the road by a deep, grassy drainage swale, a pastoral mix of meadows and thickets sloped gradually up toward a high horizon of stubbled cornfields. Three commercial establishments on the upland side of the road were spaced out among a scattering of well-kept older homes. There was a gas station, a veterinary clinic, and an auto-body shop whose parking area held half a dozen cars in various stages of repair.
Not far past the body shop, Gurney rounded a long bend and saw ahead of him on the left side of the road the first indications of a major crime scene: an assortment of local, county, and state police cruisers. There were also four vans—two, presumably from regional media outlets, with satellite dishes on their roofs; one with the NYSP emblem, which Gurney assumed would contain the evidence team’s equipment; and one that was unmarked, probably the forensic photographer’s. There was no sign of a morgue vehicle, meaning someone from the ME’s office had already come and gone and the body had been transported from the scene.
As he drew closer, Gurney counted six uniformed officers with various jurisdictional insignias, a woman and a man in the conservative business attire favored by detective units, an evidence specialist in the white coveralls and latex gloves required by his occupation, and a fashionably dressed female TV type huddled with two ponytailed male technicians.
A uniformed trooper was standing in the middle of the road, aggressively waving along any car that seemed to be passing too slowly. As Gurney was coming abreast of the trooper and the Blum house behind him, he could see that PO
LICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape had been wrapped around the entire property from the edge of the lake up to the edge of the road. He reached into his glove box and pulled out a thin leather wallet, flipping it open to reveal a gold NYPD detective’s shield that bore in small letters at the bottom the word “Retired.”
Before the frowning trooper could examine it thoroughly, Gurney tossed it back in his glove box and asked if Senior Investigator Jack Hardwick was on the scene.
The trooper’s hat was tilted forward, its stiff brim shadowing his eyes. “Hardwick, BCI?”
“That’s right.”
“There some reason he should be here?”
Gurney sighed wearily. “I’m working on an investigation that could involve Ruth Blum. Hardwick’s aware of it.”
The trooper looked like he was having trouble deciphering that answer. “What’s your name?”
“Dave Gurney.”
The man eyed him with the combination of surface politeness and instinctive distrust with which most cops regard strangers. “Pull in right there.” He pointed to a space on the shoulder between the evidence van and one of the TV vans. “Stay in your car.” He turned away crisply and approached three figures engaged in an intense discussion next to the driveway. The individual to whom he spoke was a heavyset woman with short brown hair. She was wearing a navy blue jacket and matching pants. The gray-haired man on her right was in white coveralls. The younger man on her left wore a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie—the standard outfit shared by detectives, funeral directors, and Mormons. His heavily muscled shoulders, wide neck, and buzz cut made it clear which of those groups he belonged to.
As the traffic trooper was talking to them, the three looked over at Gurney in unison. The young man began grinning and speaking rapidly to the woman while gesturing in Gurney’s direction.
The grin rang a distant bell.
“Detective!” the woman called out, raising her hand to get his attention. “Detective Gurney.”
He got out of his car. As he did, he was greeted by the loud throb of a helicopter overhead. He looked up and through the treetops caught glimpses of the slowly circling craft. Giant white letters, RAM, painted on the bottom of the cabin caught his eye and provoked an involuntary grimace.
“Lieutenant Bullard wants to talk to you.” The trooper had come back over to Gurney and was lifting the police tape for him to enter the enclosed area. His tone made the tape gesture seem more proprietary than courteous.
Gurney bent forward to pass under the tape. As he did so, he couldn’t help noticing a deposit of roadway dirt that had settled into a long expansion crack separating the tarred driveway from the rougher composite pavement of the road shoulder. As he paused for a moment to take a closer look, the trooper let the tape drop on him and returned to his traffic duty.
When Gurney straightened up, the slightly familiar young man in the dark suit was walking toward him.
“Sir, you probably don’t remember me. I’m Andrew Clegg. We met during your investigation of—”
Gurney broke in warmly, “I remember you, Andy. Looks like you’ve been promoted.”
Again the grin. It turned him into a teenager. “Last month. Finally made it into BCI. You were one of my inspirations.” As he spoke, he was leading Gurney to the solidly built woman, who was talking to the departing tech in the white suit.
“If you want to bag the rug and bring it in, that’s fine, too. It’s up to you.” She turned toward Gurney. Her expression was alert and pleasantly businesslike. “Andy tells me that you and Jack Hardwick worked together on Piggert. Is that a fact?”
“That’s a fact.”
“Congrats. Big victory for the good guys.”
“Thank you.”
“His Satanic Santa case was even bigger,” said Clegg.
“Satanic …?” Now it was her turn to look as if a distant memory bell was ringing. “Was that the psycho who was cutting people up and mailing the pieces to the local cops?”
“In gift wrapping! As Christmas presents!” cried Clegg, clearly more captivated than horrified.
She stared at Gurney in amazement. “And you …?”
“Just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
“That’s remarkable.” She extended her hand. “I’m Lieutenant Bullard. And you’re obviously a man who needs no further introduction. To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“This situation with Ruth Blum.”
“How so?”
“Did you see the program with her last night on RAM?”
“I’m aware of it. Why do you ask?”
“It might help you to understand what happened here.”
“How?”
“The program was the first of a series, dealing with the aftereffects of the six murders committed by the Good Shepherd back in 2000. What happened here was almost certainly the seventh Good Shepherd murder. And there may be more coming.”
Whatever cordiality had been in her expression had given way to cool assessment. “What exactly are you doing here?”
He began to consider his words carefully—but then thought to hell with that. “I’m here because I believe the FBI got the case backwards from day one, and what happened here may prove it.”
Her expression was hard to read. “Have you told them what you think?”
He gave her a quick smile. “It didn’t go over very well.”
She shook her head. “I’m not quite getting what you’re telling me. I don’t know on whose behalf or on whose authority you’ve come here.” She glanced at Clegg, who shifted uneasily from foot to foot. “Andy told me you were retired. We’re in the crucial first hours of a murder investigation. Unless you can make your presence and purpose plain to me, you’re going to have to leave. I hope I’m being clear without being rude.”
“I understand.” He took a deep breath. “I was hired as a consultant to the woman who interviewed Ruth Blum, and I’ve been taking a close look at the Good Shepherd case. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a major flaw in the prevailing view. I’m hoping the investigation of this murder won’t get screwed up like the first six. But, unfortunately, there already seems to be a problem.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He didn’t park in the driveway.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The man who killed Ruth Blum didn’t park in this driveway. If you believe he did, you’ll never understand what happened here.”
She shot a glance in Clegg’s direction, perhaps to see if he knew more about this unexpected challenge than she did, but his eyes showed only surprise and confusion. She looked back at Gurney, then at her watch. “Come inside. I’ll give you exactly five minutes to make some sense. Meanwhile, Andy, you stay here and keep an eye on the TV vultures. They are not to put one toe on our side of the tape.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She led Gurney down a sloping lawn by the side of the house and up the steps of the rear deck—which he recognized as the location of Kim’s outdoor interview with Ruth Blum. He followed her through a back door that connected the deck with a large eat-in kitchen. A photographer was sitting at a table in a breakfast nook, downloading pictures from a digital SLR onto a laptop.
She looked around the kitchen, but it didn’t offer much opportunity for privacy. “Excuse me, Chuck, can you give us a few minutes here?”
“No problem, Lieutenant. I can finish this in the van.” He picked up his equipment and a moment later was gone.
The lieutenant sat in one of the chairs at the vacated table and motioned Gurney to the one directly opposite. “Okay,” she said evenly. “I’ve had a long day so far, and it’s nowhere near over. I have no time to waste. I’d appreciate some clarity and brevity. Speak.”
“What makes you think he parked in the driveway?”
Her eyes narrowed. “What makes you think I do?”
“The way the three of you were standing carefully to the side of it when I arrived. The way everybody
avoided walking on it, even though your tech crew must have already gone over it. So I figure it’s being saved for a more thorough microscopic analysis. How come you’re convinced he parked there?”
She studied him for a while before a cynical little smile appeared on her lips. “You already know something, don’t you? Where’s the leak?”
“No point in going down that path. That’s the FBI path. Confrontational waste of time.”
She continued to study him, not so long this time, then seemed to arrive at a decision. “The victim posted a message on her Facebook page late last night. After some comments about the RAM program, she described a car that was pulling into her driveway as she was sitting there at her computer. Why do I have a feeling that you already know all this?”
Gurney ignored her question. “What kind of car?”
“Big. Military-looking. No make or model mentioned.”
“Jeep? Land Rover? Hummer? Something like that?” She nodded.
“So the theory is that he parks out in the driveway, walks up to the front door, knocks … and then what? He kills her in the doorway? She lets him in? She knows him? She doesn’t know him?”
“Slow down. You asked me why we believe that the killer—or someone who coincidentally visited her at approximately the time she was killed—parked in the driveway. And I gave you the answer. We believe it because the victim herself told us that’s what happened. It’s the victim’s eyewitness account, posted on her Facebook page, before she was killed.” Lieutenant Bullard’s expression of triumph was diluted with a pinch of worry. “So now you owe me a brief, clear explanation of why you think Ruth Blum would say those things if they weren’t true.”
“She didn’t.”
“Beg pardon?”
“None of it happened that way. The scenario you’re presenting doesn’t make any sense. First of all, before we get into the logical problem, you’ve got a physical-evidence problem at the end of the driveway.”
“What physical-evidence problem?”
“The ground is fairly dry. How long has it been since the last rain?” He knew when it had rained in Walnut Crossing, but the weather system around the Finger Lakes was often quite different.